The demons within

No one could teach humanity to our callous clan. Nobody could teach reality to a land that dies of dreams of plunder. Who could teach direction to a people that thrive on monstrosity and misdirection?

As we approach 2015, we enthuse about the possibility of rebirth. Our talk is of a new dawn but if we look closely enough, we shall find that there is no light in the skies yet. Last sunrise – at the beginning of the current dispensation – the sun betrayed a hint of tiredness. It seemed to have withdrawn into some new distance – like the North Star that suddenly discovers the unworthiness of our pirate ship for its guiding light. We are still that great ship with no certain commitment to compass and outlast our course’s most hideous storms.

As we approach 2015, every moment uncoils as that in which we return to sup on yesterday’s vomit, like starved greyhounds. We are recycling the same old faces, same old politics, same old hurt. Every minute passes like that in which seedlings and crop shoots fear the late and early rainstorms. Our young expects too little, still; and our old still indulge in pleasurable reminiscences even as they discover no logic to justify that which they had forsaken and squandered.

Come 2015, we expect that things will change for the better. But nothing will change for the better because we have appointed career undertakers to midwife our new dawn, again. Come 2015, more promises will be broken and fear’s moonflower will spread and attain full blossom, till our proverbial dawn illumines as familiar dusk of compromise. And that is because we have refused to change.

An in-depth scrutiny into our psyches would reveal the depth of our affinity to leadership we have. Our thoughts, politics and actions, while lacking in philosophy and conviction betrays on one hand, wanton inclinations to aid and abet our current leadership, and on the flipside, an excessive confidence in our personal judgment and contempt for the advice and criticism of others.

We have suggested population control. We have suggested greater government support and presence in the Niger Delta claiming that since it is Nigeria’s only reliable source of national income, the federal government ought to devote greater time, money and other resources to the region.

We have suggested that we paid more attention to our ailing agricultural sector. We claim it would do us great good if we could revivify our dying cocoa industry, collapsed groundnut pyramids and struggling oil palm sector. Not to forget our persistent rant about our abject neglect of our tourist attractions. It’s amusing to see us mount the soap-box in fickle fits of contempt – in our liquor and rant-activated pubs, living-rooms, courtyards and pages of our sensational newsprints. We have perfected the art of lamentation, bandying angst and pitiful punch lines to bemoan our rudderless politics.

What’s your poison? Nigeria’s leadership problem? Pervasive poverty? Endemic corruption? Religious upheavals cum perversion of faith? What is it that causes riotous incense to course through your brain? The abject rot of the Onyeama Coal Mine? The collapse of Ajaokuta Steel as well as other appendages to Nigeria’s steel sector? Our underperforming oil refineries and Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN)? What excites your grief? Our conduit-built and corruption-activated ministries?

Nigeria ruins and stagnates like cocoyam sodden in a mud field and we continue to articulate textbook remedies to problems that are best resolved by truth, honesty and impeccable character. Today, we suggest a sovereign national conference or referendum to provide the forum by which we could redress the state of the union. What manner of redress do we seek? Many have suggested that we break-up. They claim we shall do better if we go our separate ways.

Now picture the dissolution of our 53-year old union; what plenitude could it bring? What manner of peace, justice and stability could we derive from a relapse to humanity’s often wildest and best-forgotten enterprise?

What would be our role in the new order? Shall we reinvent the millipede by calling it, ‘snake?’ Shall the lion cub become tomcat simply because it is kept as a house pet? We could reinvent ourselves as much as we like; we could secede by our terms as many times as we like; we could quote Nietzsche, Plato, Disreali et al and re-echo the idiosyncrasies of our favourite columnists for as long as it gets us to justify our cynicism and grief; nothing will change.

Our lives shan’t get better. Nigeria won’t become the land of honey and milk we wish it would become until we change.

It’s a fundamental nature of our society that we accept abnormality and debauchery as incontestable parts of our nature. Yet if we did not indulge in such abject perversions and pitiable evasions as our principle of moral agnosticism which imbues us to be tolerant of anything and everything, we could have matured enough in intellect and psyche to know how and why not to compromise between truth and falsehood, reason and irrationality.

We could have attained such maturity that would enable us to understand that the values we project become the essence of our socio-politics and being – whether we like it or not. Every utterance we make, as our most humane and inhumane actions and reactions, intensify the simplicity or degeneracy of our individual perceptions, as well as the rationality and otherwise of politics we choose to scorn or celebrate.

It needn’t be so hard to be good. But it is – simply because despite our touted morality, wisdom and predilection to evolve a quintessential civilization, we have lost direction. Knowingly, we scorn both our glaring and latent abilities to discern that proverbial path to the realization of the essence and undeniable benefits of being good. Consequently, our culture and our lives disintegrate for our lack of character.

When we ennoble double-speak and refrain from praising men’s virtues and condemning their vices, our fraudulence declares and we foster the corruption of our larger society. No practicable and highfaluting panacea could resolve our most hideous realities until we attain the essence of goodness without being self-righteous.

Simply put, there can be no compromise, however exquisitely couched, between us and the depravity we tolerate. Aiding and abetting corruption in the spirit of socio-economic and political expediency is hardly a compromise but a cowardly surrender to the elements that disintegrates and make bleak.

Whether we like it or not, there can be no compromise or wanton sophistry acceptable on basic principles and fundamental issues. It’s time we desist from every conscious quest to improve the status quo from the deceitful springboard of compromise. The change we seek subsists in random and premeditated acts of goodness that we have learnt to forsake: like a citizen’s resoluteness to respect the traffic light and a local government chairman’s immutable passion to improve life at the grassroots – particularly when the world isn’t looking.